Facebook’s Edgerank is evolving: There are now over 100,000 criteria that factor into what a fan sees on their Newsfeed on a daily basis. Details on such factors are hard to come by, but there is new insight on what goes into Facebook’s latest algorithm/ranking system based off of a survey of current users.
To summarize, Facebook is making it easier to determine what content is higher quality — and what is not. Now, digital marketers will need to keep an extra close eye on content that is trustworthy, pertinent and useful for the fan in order to stay at the top of a Newsfeed.
Here’s how you can make sure your content stands out:
- Create Quality Posts: Facebook is an incredibly intertwined community and therefore, the content pushed out to fans should help keep it feeling that way. As a result, the copy that goes along with a photo or link should be engaging and keep your audience wanting more. Does your company answer the following questions (as asked by Facebook)? Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others? Would you call this a low quality post or meme? Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?
- Concentrate on True Engagement: Before, asking fans to “Like” a post or “Share” a link typically got fans to engage. However, Facebook has now implemented rules around such requests of fans which may come with negative metric results. Therefore, be extra mindful of the content that you are posting, as it should organically get fans to engage — and come back for more in the future.
- Offer Various Types of Posts: If you didn’t know, many Facebook Pages relied on image-heavy post to obtain great engagement in the past and thus, received more eyes on their content. Today, Facebook has made many changes to how other types of content is being seen. For example, they recently updated how links are displayed in the Newsfeed (FB increased the size of the image in the links), hence why marketers need to rethink the type of content that they are typically using. If your company only pushes images, you may be negatively effected by not reaching the majority of your fans who may prefer text-only or posts with links.
Lastly, there have been additional edits to Edgerank that may also effect if and how your content is being seen by fans on Facebook. Story Bumping, for instance, moves past posts to the top of a fan’s Newsfeed if they did not see it before. Such stories are chosen based on who posted the content and the connection between said company/person and the fan at hand. For now, we’ve only seen it being used between fans, but this is evidence of the direction that Facebook is currently headed. As we’ve noted, Facebook is now providing fans with the posts that they find most useful or entertaining, versus a random Newsfeed of information.
Takeaway: Although we’re thrilled that Facebook is making the necessary changes to make sure the content a fan sees is relevant and valuable, this makes it more difficult (but not impossible) for a marketer or company to be successful on this popular platform. Take the above tips into consideration and the Newsfeed will take notice!
— Samantha & Mike
SIKE SOCIAL 